“We drank from the river and made Pilas, after we drank we walked about 50 yards up river, it was there we found 20 dead bodies in the river. The Cuban started vomiting. It didn’t matter to me, I never got sick.”

“They would go to homes to gather up the families and would burn their houses down. Those who did not leave the mountainside were considered Contra so they would kill them by burning them with gas, we saw what they did."

After missing a Sandinista meeting at the local school, Victorio was suspected of being a Contra collaborator. He spent a month in prison. He endured leeches,beatings and having bags filled with lye placed over his head until he couldn’t breath.

"They grabbed me on my way home from playing baseball. My clothes were covered in dirt. They accused me of returning from training in the the mountains. They threw me in a cell with 40 others for 3 months. That is where I learned to fight. I was 14."

“They came up from behind us. Right when I got up they shot me. After that I just kept running and running. I saw a big tree and I hid behind it. They climbed over the tree and I moved under it. I told myself “I’m going to die this way.”

Exposed atrocities committed by the Contras created significant political backlash in the U.S. As a result, the CIA issued specific guidelines regarding human rights directives and interrogation procedures to Contra commandantes.

(L to R) Antonio Roman, Juan Oseda, Pablo Aguilera. Sadistic torturers known for collecting ears and filing down the teeth of prisoners. Two of them hid in a church after the end of the war. They were dragged into the town square and beaten to death.

“When I came home from school they had hung my brother from a tree along the street. They killed him and lit his body on fire. When I saw his body I wanted to kill as many of those fuckers as I could.”

Charillo constantly repeats himself over and over. He fought for 4 years in the jungle. He is the lone survivor of his unit. Homeless and destitute, he was found wandering the streets of Matagalpa by an FSLN veteran and now lives with him and his family.

Ben Linder was an American volunteer building a small hydroelectric dam in rural northern Nicaragua when he was ambushed and killed by Contra rebels in 1987. This photo was taken the day after Dia de los Muertos 2010.